Bartolomeo Cristiano in Naples: “Mediterranean – A Sea of ​​Gold”, an exhibition on the decline of the West

Naples – The inauguration of the new exhibition by Bartolomeo Cristiano, entitled Mediterranean – A Sea of ​​Gold. Sunrise and Sunset of the West, will be held on May 30, at 18:00 p.m., in the evocative Church of Sant'Angelo a Segno, in via dei Tribunali 45.

The exhibition, open to the public until June 22, 2025 with the patronage of the Municipality of Naples and the Campania Region, presents itself as an event of great cultural impact, an aesthetic and conceptual journey that questions the destiny of the West through the symbol of the Mediterranean.

Bartolomeo Cristiano, a Neapolitan artist and thinker trained in Architecture and with an artistic path rooted since adolescence, returns to enchant the Neapolitan scene with a corpus of works that explore the Mare Nostrum as a crossroads of civilizations, religions and memories.

His canvases, dense with matter and meaning, do not limit themselves to depicting landscapes, but dig into the debris of history, questioning the glorious past of Hellas and Rome and the twilight of the contemporary era. As the scholar Idilia Rossi points out, Cristiano traces "a historical parable, from the splendor of ancient civilizations to the disenchantment of our time".

The Mediterranean, in his works, is both the cradle and the mirror of decadence. From a mythical place of cultural exchange to a frontier marked by migratory tragedies, the sea becomes witness to a humanity that has lost its sense of limits and the sacred. "Technology has surpassed necessity," writes the artist, denouncing a West that is sinking in the inability to rethink itself, ignoring its own crisis while abandoning itself to a "pleasant" descent.

The works exhibited, large and layered, invite a deep reflection: not only aesthetic, but also political and philosophical. Cristiano does not propose a mere exhibition, but a poetic act that challenges the viewer to confront the ruins of a declining world, seeking, perhaps, a possibility of rebirth in the awareness of truth and beauty.

Born in Grumo Nevano and active in Naples, Cristiano combines his academic training with a pictorial vision that transcends the canvas, becoming a mirror of the soul and an invitation to dialogue. Mediterraneo – Un mare d’oro announces itself as an unmissable event, a visual elegy that celebrates and questions the destiny of a civilization on the border between dawn and dusk.